Everyone hates filling out online forms

No, visitors to your site don't want to give you their email. Or their name. Or their company. Or their address. They are fed up and starting to revolt.

How often have you been to a site and been tempted by the lure of free information, a special report or a white paper, only to end up feeling as though you've been digitally violated by the in-depth data you must reveal to gain access?

Software firm Red Hat tested removing the registration forms in front of its white papers. Director of Marketing Communications Chris Grams reported, "We found, in our estimation, it makes more sense to open it up in most cases. If we do not put a capture form in front of it, let's say we'll get 1,000 people to view it. If we put a capture form there, we'll get 50 people to view."

Fact 1 - Typing contact info is a pain

If you must have a form, pre-fill as many of the fields as possible. This response-increasing technique has been used in direct mail for years. Clearly it's not always possible, but if you take the extra time in your form's development, prospects will love you for it and increase their response in turn.

Fact 2 - It's about control

Your prospects want their life and personal details back. When they fill in a form they are handing control over to you, the vendor. In this world of shifting marketing communications paradigms, the pendulum has swung back to consumer control. Don't fight it. Work with it.

For example, research undertaken by ThomasNet revealed that "industrial buyers are growing increasingly frustrated with the lack of privacy they are experiencing online."

  • 89 percent of industrial buyers say they want anonymity when searching the Internet for information and "... that desire for anonymity is not being respected."
  • 77 percent of respondents had a 'don't call us, we'll call you' philosophy online.
  • Three out of four buyers are proactively trying to limit the number of promotions they get, and they still report being "hounded", "bombarded", and "inundated" with unwanted contacts from suppliers.
  • 56 percent of respondents do not want vendors to contact them until they have made the initial contact.
  • 81 percent of respondents said they would not return, or would be unlikely to return, to a website that reveals their identity to suppliers.

Does this mean you should remove all registration forms and stop offering newsletters and other free information online? Absolutely not. But it might pay to revisit your registration forms from a prospective client's point of view.

Is collecting the registration information so mission-critical to your sales process that you are willing to miss the brand-building opportunity of openly available, high quality content that can be accessed by your prospects on their terms?

Some studies suggest that just three to six percent of visitors to websites are willing to fill in a form. Could there be a real client hidden away in the other 94 percent?

Get more headlines every month - Subscribe to 7 Seconds